ABSTRACT
In this chapter Dimock considers the relationship between trust and cooperation, arguing that trust can facilitate cooperation in a wide range of social situations and between diverse people (e.g., between friends, family members, professionals and their clients, and even strangers). She does so by relativizing trust: trust involves doing what is expected or the right thing to do, for reasons that are compatible with the relationship in question being a good token of its type. More controversially, she also argues that trust can make cooperating even in one-shot Prisoner’s Dilemmas not only possible but rational. Her defense of this position rests on an optimizing rather than maximizing conception of practical rationality (à la David Gauthier). That people can trust in PDs is just one example of a broader truth, namely, that trusting always requires individuals to reject opportunism within the trust relationship. Trust relationships create opportunities for one party to exploit the trust of the other in ways incompatible with its being a good relationship of its type, so as to benefit the violator at the expense of her cooperative partners. Rejecting such opportunities as reasons giving is at the heart of being trustworthy and the most important condition of cooperation.
